This post is a follow-up to my November 19 webinar, “Tips from
the Trenches: A Guide to Preventing Downtime for the
Over-Extended DBA,” during which I described some of the most
common reasons DBAs experience avoidable downtime. The session
was aimed at the “over-stretched DBA,” identified as the MySQL
DBA short of time or an engineer of another discipline without
the depth of the MySQL system. The over-stretched DBA may be
prone to making fundamental mistakes that cause downtime through
poor response time, operations that cause blocking on important
data or administrative mishaps through the lack of best practice
monitoring and …

MySQL table alterations can interrupt production traffic causing
bad customer experience or in worst cases, loss of revenue. Not
all DBAs, developers, syadmins know MySQL well enough to avoid
this pitfall. DBAs usually encounter these kinds of production
interruptions when working with upgrade scripts that touch both
application and database or if an inexperienced admin/dev
engineer perform the schema change without knowing how MySQL
operates internally.

Truths
* Direct MySQL ALTER table locks for duration of change
(pre-5.6)
* Online DDL in MySQL 5.6 is not always online and may incurr
locks
* Even with …

The Percona Managed Services team recently faced a somewhat
peculiar client issue. We’d receive pages about their MySQL
service being unreachable. However, studying the logs showed
nothing out of the ordinary…. for the most part it appeared to be
a normal shutdown and there was nothing in anyone’s command
history nor a cron task to speak of that was suspicious.

This is one of those obscure and peculiar (read: unique) issues
that triggered an old memory; I’d seen this behavior before and I
had just the tool to catch the culprit in the act.

The Percona Backup Service managed service
launched today. It ensures properly configured backups run
successfully as scheduled on customer provided backup storage –
whether on premise, in the cloud, or a hybrid. Backup issues or
production data recovery are efficiently handled by Percona Managed Services technicians with deep
knowledge of MySQL.

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